The Templars Series

The Templar Series is my attempt to encapsulate the amazing and fascinating phenomenon of the rise and fall of the first and greatest of the medieval Monastic Military Orders, the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. The Order had several names in the course of it brief and incandescent history–it existed for less than 200 years and yet, save for the Papacy itself, it was easily the most influential organization in the world while it existed–but we remember it today as the Order of the Knights Templar. The three stand-alone novels of the trilogy illustrate the highlights of the Templars’ story–the beginning, the middle and the end–and each of the three stories is unique and admirable in its own right. Knights of the Black and White, the first of the three books, examines the astonishing tale of the Order’s earliest beginnings, when it was founded by nine penniless French knights who called themselves the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ. The second book, Standard of Honour, portrays the Templars at the peak of their power, serving as the standing army of Christianity in the Holy Lands during the Third Crusade, when Richard the Lionheart battled the armies of the Moslem Sultan, Saladin, and the third, Order in Chaos examines the aftermath of Friday the 13th of October, 1307, when every Templar in France was arrested and imprisoned in the space of a single morning and the Order effectively ceased to exist.

Because the three stories occur at approximately 90-year intervals, there is no continuity of characters between the novels, but there is a definite continuity of bloodlines. The St. Clair/ Sinclair name appears consistently throughout the lore of the Temple and I have borrowed it shamelessly in the cause of narrative continuity . . . much to the chagrin of some of my friends in the academic historians’ community. But then, no matter how thorough and painstaking the research I pursue, I am when all is said and done a writer of fiction and I refuse to let a small thing like a disputed name for a character stand in the way of a good story…